Soapbox

Jed Devilbiss and Mike Cashman won the Westminster Area Soapbox Derby championships yesterday, but the prize for grit went to Julie Thomas.The 11-year-old first-time soapbox racer from Westminster coasted past the finish line in one of the afternoon's elimination heats, hit the brake -- and kept right on going."

In addition to swimming with Michael Phelps ' instructors and battling with handmade robots, Baltimore summer school students will be building soapbox cars to help keep their minds revving until the next school year. In a program that began Tuesday, 2,000 middle school students will participate in what the district has themed a "Grand Prix" of summer learning in anticipation of the world-class auto racing event coming to the city in early September. It's the newest programming effort by the school system to join the nationwide campaign to combat summer learning loss and continue the district's emphasis on a summer science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)

Bryan Brilhart and Jesse Gist returned home this week from their weeklong trip to Akron, Ohio, where they competed in the 55th annual All-American Soapbox Derby.The highlight for both was Saturday's race, as the two Westminster residents competed with 208 other youngsters from all over the world.Brilhart, 11, competed in the stock car division, while Gist, 10, raced in the kit car division. They earned the right to represent Carroll County in the national derby by winning their respective divisions in the Carroll County Soapbox Derby last month in Westminster.

Baltimore N. Charles Street $25,000 reward offered by FBI in robbery attempt at bank The Baltimore office of the FBI is offering a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the identification, indictment and conviction of the men who attempted to rob a Loomis Armored employee Wednesday afternoon outside a bank in the 400 block of N. Charles St. FBI Agent Richard Wolf, spokesman for the Baltimore-Delaware offices of the bureau, said a Loomis employee...

Joseph Skelton rode his bike 10 miles to get to the Inner Harbor yesterday for a shot at 30 seconds of national fame.Along with about 50 other people, Skelton took a turn standing atop a red soapbox at Harborplace near McKeldin Fountain. Each person got to talk about a subject of his or her choosing for 15 to 30 seconds for a national advertising campaign for soft-drink newcomer Virgin Cola.At least one will be picked for the national "Say Something" campaign with ads to air as early as year's end. For their trouble, participants received $1.Skelton, 57, took his bicycle up on the soapbox with him, wearing his safety helmet, a khaki knapsack on his back and socks pulled up around his knees.

By Phillip Robinson and Phillip Robinson,Knight-Ridder News Service | January 4, 1993

It's transition time. The new man is headed for Washington and is picking his new team. What say we all give him some advice?A couple of new programs help you get into the transition spirit, aiding you in crafting and addressing letters to public servants (and those who ought to be): Write Your Congressman! and Federal Soapbox.WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN! (Contact Software $39.95, (800) 365-0606) is a specialized version of the 1st Act! contact management program. 1st Act! lets you store and quickly sift through a list of people's names, addresses and phone numbers.

Baltimore N. Charles Street $25,000 reward offered by FBI in robbery attempt at bank The Baltimore office of the FBI is offering a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the identification, indictment and conviction of the men who attempted to rob a Loomis Armored employee Wednesday afternoon outside a bank in the 400 block of N. Charles St. FBI Agent Richard Wolf, spokesman for the Baltimore-Delaware offices of the bureau, said a Loomis employee...

FROM JUST SOUTH of U.S. 29 and Route 32, here's an Olympic dream that's in its earliest scenes but has one of the more accidental starts you'll ever hear. Ryan Harrigan, a seventh-grader at Lime Kiln Middle School in Fulton who turns 13 on Thursday, races soapbox cars. He's good. So his father, Mike, was fishing the Internet for a suit of high-tech fabric that might clip .005 of a second off Ryan's best time in soapbox car racing when he stumbled onto what could become his older son's real sport - luge.

"Inspecting Carol" is the "Noises Off" of Christmas plays -- with some political awareness thrown in for good measure.The hit British farce "Noises Off" is about a production in which everything that can go wrong does. In "Inspecting Carol," a professional theater company called the Soapbox Playhouse gets in deeper and deeper trouble as it attempts to mount its annual production of "A Christmas Carol."The leading man is determined to rewrite the script to fit his own knee-jerk liberal agenda; Tiny Tim has grown so big, his size threatens to break Bob Cratchit's already weak back; and the actor playing the three ghosts can't learn his lines.

The four Johns Hopkins University graduate students were analyzing their latest project. On top of regular classes and research, the material science and engineering majors had devoted what little free time they had to an endeavor that stretched their expertise. The result: Timmy the Turtle. Teammates Greg Fritz, 25; Travis De Journett, 25; Janice Lin, 26; and Matt Simone, 23, gathered yesterday morning to show off Timmy, the turtle-shaped cart that will make its official debut Saturday at the Red Bull Soapbox Race in Providence, R.I. Fritz will attempt to steer Timmy down a steep quarter-mile track in a time trial against 59 other bizarrely decorated human-powered vehicles, which Red Bull, an energy drink, predicts could reach speeds up to 35 mph. "Our sights are set on winning," Fritz says.

Technorati's most recent state-of-the-blogosphere report was full of the familiar optimism we've seen in past reports. The blog-tracking site is now monitoring more than 70 million blogs and seeing 120,000 new blogs created each day. "The state of the blogosphere is strong, and is maturing as an influential and important part of the Web," summarized founder Dave Sifry in his twice-yearly report last month. Sifry's assessment is true from a bird's-eye view, but a closer examination of the numbers strips away some of his optimism.

The cast of Progress Theatre is transforming the stage into its soapbox with a message that's loud and clear: Cultural stereotypes are destructive to humanity. In its production Peaches, the cast addresses racial issues still alive in America today and hopes to pry open minds at Theatre Project tonight. "Entertainment is a vehicle to talk about things, and we can use it to interrogate different issues with all the styles and genres that can be incorporated into theater," said playwright and director Cristal Chanelle Truscott.

WASHINGTON - Like many 24-year-olds, Matthew Slutsky keeps his iPod close at hand. He listens to it going to work, doing errands, walking down the street - whenever he is "on the go," he says. But some of the most listened-to names in Slutsky's iPod are not today's hottest bands; they're politicians and political pundits. Every morning, he downloads the latest "AfterNote," a politics newscast from ABC, and listens to it on his way to his job at a political consulting firm. Slutsky also listens to former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards and to Al Franken, talk show host on the liberal Air America radio network.

At the same time that director Jonathan Demme was mounting the milestone anti-yuppie comedy, Something Wild (1986), the hilarious Mafia parody, Married to the Mob (1988), the breakthrough serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and the first mainstream-film attack on homophobia in the time of AIDS, Philadelphia (1993), he was slaking his thirst for unspoiled culture and liberation politics by plunging into all things Haitian. Demme's previous documentaries about Haiti barely made it past the festival circuit.

At the same time that director Jonathan Demme was mounting the milestone anti-yuppie comedy, Something Wild (1986), the hilarious Mafia parody, Married to the Mob (1988), the breakthrough serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and the first mainstream-film attack on homophobia in the time of AIDS, Philadelphia (1993), he was slaking his thirst for unspoiled culture and liberation politics by plunging into all things Haitian. Demme's previous documentaries about Haiti barely made it past the festival circuit.

Absolute Friends, by John Le Carre. Little, Brown. 400 pages. $26.95. Few writers can introduce a character with the skill or panache of John LeCarre. The opening chapter of his new novel, Absolute Friends, offers us the splendidly complex Ted Mundy, an English-language tour guide at a Bavarian castle. Zeroing in on Mundy through the eyes of a tourist, LeCarre wonders, "Who is this Ted Mundy?... A bit of a comedian obviously. A failure at something -- a professional English bloody fool in a bowler and a Union Jack, all things to all men and nothing to himself, fifty in the shade, nice enough chap, wouldn't necessarily trust him with my daughter.

By Kimberly A.C. Wilson and David Nitkin and Kimberly A.C. Wilson and David Nitkin,SUN STAFF | January 17, 2004

The wind whips up West Street like a fury, stabbing through gloved fingers and forcing out tears. So the watermelon leaning in a storefront window, green, out-of-season, has to mean something. It sits in prime political advertising space, in the bay window of the Maryland Republican Party in Annapolis - within sight of the State House and on a busy thoroughfare. The window used to be a dusty, forgotten spot with faded posters from failed campaigns. But since a Republican moved into the governor's mansion, it's become a feisty glass soapbox.

Absolute Friends, by John Le Carre. Little, Brown. 400 pages. $26.95. Few writers can introduce a character with the skill or panache of John LeCarre. The opening chapter of his new novel, Absolute Friends, offers us the splendidly complex Ted Mundy, an English-language tour guide at a Bavarian castle. Zeroing in on Mundy through the eyes of a tourist, LeCarre wonders, "Who is this Ted Mundy?... A bit of a comedian obviously. A failure at something -- a professional English bloody fool in a bowler and a Union Jack, all things to all men and nothing to himself, fifty in the shade, nice enough chap, wouldn't necessarily trust him with my daughter.